A long, rambling energy-related screed

by: Eric B.

Wed Mar 14, 2007 at 12:01:50 PM EDT

Case and point, today's article in the News about today's Congressional testimony featuring the Big Three and Toyota.

Said Ziad Ojakli, Ford's vice president for governmental affairs: "We want to be part of the solution, but we don't want to be the entire solution."

The auto executives are not criminals, nor are they sinister operators who set out to hook American consumers on harmful products.

They are honorable men and women who are doing their best against long odds to keep alive three companies that are crucial not only to the health of Michigan, but of the nation.

Their reputations should not be muddied by grandstanding politicians.

...

Much of his motivation in calling the auto chiefs to the Capitol today is to keep them from being subpoenaed by Markey, whom Pelosi put in charge of a new global warming committee with a budget in excess of $1 million but little hope of bringing a bill to the floor.

He and Waxman, who led the questioning of the tobacco executives 13 years ago, want to set themselves up as the slayers of the global warming dragon.

But shutting down auto plants will not be met with the same public enthusiasm as shuttering tobacco barns.

The real conversation, at least according to the one outlined in the news report, will be about fuel economy standards, which problematic in their own right.  On the other hand, I saw a commercial last night in which an automaker pitched that you could either buy his one huge pickup truck or two of someone else's.  Despite the auto makers plan to tout their green creds to Congress, the commercial never once mentioned how many gallons to the mile the truck uses.  So it's hard to jibe what the Big Three are telling the media with what they're using to get people to buy their vehicles.

They are said to be planning to point to the thousands of corn-powered cars as evidence of moving forward.  Ethanol, in Michigan like everywhere else, has gotten a great deal of newspaper ink spilled in its behalf.  Here's a quick primer on why it's not nearly as swell as advertised

If you make ethanol from corn, the environmental benefits are limited. When you consider the greenhouse gases that are released in the growing and refining process, corn-based ethanol is only slightly better than gasoline. Growing corn also requires the use of pesticides and fertilizers that cause soil and water pollution.

That is largely based, mind you, on burning natural gas to make ethanol (there is an ethanol plant planned for the Ithaca area, and I'm told they have two natural gas lines connected to it).  But, natural gas prices are rising, and will probably continue rising as more and more countries use it for a wider assortment of things (including the manufacture of ethanol).  That means finding a cheaper source of energy for the process ... and that cheaper source of energy is coal, enemy of all that is good and dear (and which would probably strangle you in your sleep if it got the chance.

Coal, as we all know, is both plentiful and relatively cheap.  We've got fistfuls of it.  But, the problem are the carbon emissions (those giant things sticking up on the front of the Al Gore DVD ... that's related).  Clean coal, touted by coal states and utilities, isn't.  That is, isn't clean.  It relies on new technology to sequester carbon emissions underground, which is a lot more difficult than as advertised.  Further, the best way to get coal, at least in West Virginia, is to saw off the top of a mountain and deposit the dirt and rock into a nearby valley (destroying not only the valley, but any streams or creeks unlucky enough to flow through it).

Yet, it's cheap enough that despite it's massive associated problems that across the Midwest an entire new fleet of coal-fired plants are planned.  That includes about 10 in Michigan.

''They do a wonderful job,'' Spegel said of the Karn-Weadock complex. ''Technology is getting ... better and better. They're a great company.

''I understand that there's probably going to be some naysayers out there because of the environmental issues, but I don't think you can point the finger at Consumers Energy and say they're not doing enough'' to clean up their emissions.

There are plenty of "fingers" one could point at Consumers over this, not the least of which is that, at a time when we're beginning to understand the biggest downside of using coal (global warming), the company plans to put its head down and plow forward with new coal plants.  For their part, local officials ignore both the long-term and big picture consequences of it all, and instead get excited about what it could mean for the next 10 years.

I don't know what the point of all of this is, and that perhaps is the point ... the disjointed, chaotic state of our energy strategy.  Our road to this point was guided by problems evident even in the short space of this post -- sacred cow industries, Chicken Little warnings of economic doom, ballyhooed technologies that are at best band-aid solutions, and short-sighted politicians who can't see anything any further into the future than the next six months.  But, there is no strategy for developing real answers to the root causes, which is why our approach is to either pursue some silver bullet cure or just to ignore the symptoms.